Paul R. Riley

BIOGRAPHY

Paul Riley is a British Heart Foundation Professor of Regenerative Medicine and Chair of Development and Cell Biology within the Department of Physiology Anatomy & Genetics.  He is also Director of the BHF Oxbridge Centre for Regenerative Medicine and inaugural Director of the Institute of Developmental & Regenerative Medicine. He was formerly Professor of Molecular Cardiology at the UCL-Institute of Child Health, London, where he was a principal investigator within the Molecular Medicine Unit for 12 years (1999-2011). Prior to this, he obtained his PhD at UCL and completed post-doctoral fellowships in Toronto and Oxford. In 2008, Professor Riley was awarded an Outstanding Achievement Award by the European Society of Cardiology, in recognition of his team’s discovery that activated epicardial cells can regenerate the adult mammalian heart. In 2014 he was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.

Research Interests

We study cardiovascular development to understand the basis of congenital heart disease and to inform on potential strategies to target heart regeneration after a “heart attack”. We combine insights gained from zebrafish and mouse models with human studies to identify evolutionary conserved cellular and molecular pathways that underpin normal development and may act as therapeutic targets to repair and regenerate the injured or diseased adult heart.  Combining studies on model organisms that can inherently regenerate their hearts after injury, such as adult zebrafish and neonatal mice, provides a platform for extrapolating our findings to human heart attack patients with the ultimate goal to restore normal heart function and prevent the onset of heart failure.

Our studies on heart development focus on key lineages, including the epicardium, lymphatic vasculature and tissue resident macrophages. We are part of a Wellcome-funded Human Developmental Biology Initiative (HDBI) which seeks to gain fundamental insights into human development. Our focus is on cell lineage contributions to the early forming human heart and key morphogenetic events (outflow tract formation and septation of the chambers) which are implicated in congenital heart disease.

To extrapolate to heart regeneration, we aim to understand how to reactivate embryonic programmes in key adult cell types, enabling us to restore cardiovascular tissues. Two embryonic processes we study in this regard are epicardial cell activation (so-called epithelial-to-mesenchyme transition) and lymphatic vessel growth and sprouting (termed lymphangiogenesis). These are targets for ongoing small molecule drug-discovery, combining human cell-based screens, automated imaging, machine learning and medicinal chemistry. In parallel, we study how to condition the local injury environment to provide an optimal setting in which to restore lost cardiovascular tissues. Here we are targeting modulation of the immune response (immunomodulation) and reduced scarring of the heart (anti-fibrosis) both during the initial (acute) stages of injury and longer term to prevent complications associated with (chronic) heart failure.